"Evolution: crabs go deep to avoid hot water", WUN Seminar

The series is a coherent collection of virtual seminars presented on a monthly basis by leading figures to a live international audience of faculty and graduate students. It uses innovative intellectual approaches and new technologies to explore recent debates and developments in earth systems.

This year the series theme will be "Co-evolution of life and the planet". Increasing research interest is focusing on the way that environmental factors and biological evolution can influence each other mutually. The 2009/2010 session will present on a variety of processes that demonstrate this co-evolution of life and the planet. In particular, the series will investigate the relationship of extreme environmental events and punctuated evolution, and broaden out to cover biodiversity and biogeochemistry of paleoecosystems (for example the impact of ocean acidification), the recorded response of biota to extreme climatic events, and their interaction in the evolution of the atmosphere. The seminar series spans a diverse range of such major events and how organisms reacted and modified the response, and as usual we expect some lively debate among the WUN audience!